Carroll Fife is one of three founders of the 501(c)(3) organization Moms 4 Housing, and the city councilmember of Oakland, California for its 3rd district since January 2021.
Carroll Fife is one of three founders of the 501(c)(3) organization Moms 4 Housing, and the city councilmember of Oakland, California for its 3rd district since January 2021.
Fife was born in Michigan. As a teenager, Fife, the middle of three children, worked in Muskegon Heights, Michigan. She alleges her grandfather was one of the first Black city councilmen in Muskegon. [1]
After becoming a parent, she settled in Pasadena, California and then moved to Oakland in 1999 to create a small private school which closed four years later. [1]
Fife has a degree in psychology from Holy Names University, a private school she attended as an adult. She worked as a paralegal before working for the community-based Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). [1] In 2017 she was named the interim director of the Oakland/San Francisco chapter of ACCE. [2]
Fife received national attention in 2019 as the co-founder of Moms 4 Housing, a group of Black mothers who occupied a vacant corporate-owned West Oakland home, advocating that housing should be recognized as a basic human right. [3]
In a 2022 interview, Fife told SFGate that homelessness in Oakland was directly due to "neo-liberal policies" and "race-blind policies" created by the "overproduction of market rate units and rapid speculation". In June 2022, the council unanimously approved Fife's plan to create a rent registry to make rental property ownership and historical rental price information available to the public. [4]
Fife won her 2020 election to the Oakland City Council, defeating the two-term incumbent by nearly 20 percentage points. [5] In 2021, she voted to shift $17.4 million in funding from the Oakland Police Department to the Department of Violence Prevention, which resulted in another loss of 50 police officers in Oakland. [6]
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in January 2023, Fife, a Black woman, publicized the violent and racist threats she had received against her and other public officials. Fife told KQED news, "The only reason I posted it is because it’s gotten worse lately. Because this has been happening to me, honestly, pretty consistently since Moms 4 Housing". [7]
During a February 2023 homeless camp closure, an altercation between Fife and Vincent Williams, the founder of the Urban Compassion Project, broke out when Williams loudly accused Fife of trying to derail the relocation of the residents. [8] The incident ended when Fife’s longtime partner, Tur-Ha Ak, [9] pushed Williams to the ground. [8] Fife told KRON-TV that Ak interceded after Williams lunged at her, but Williams said Ak attacked him. [8] A battery charge was filed against Ak in January 2024, and was later dismissed. [10]
In November 2023, the Associated Press reported that Fife's resolution to call for a ceasefire in the Gaza war passed the Oakland City Council 8–0. The resolution had no legal implications as the Oakland city council does not govern Gaza. [11]
Fife said Williams accused her of paying advocates with the organization Love and Justice in the Streets to tell the unhoused members of the encampment not to accept housing. Fife and Ak both allege that Williams was threatening advocates who were helping to clean the site. According to Fife, Williams lunged at her, and she became concerned. She said after multiple warnings were issued, Ak stepped in.
Everyone agrees that Williams verbally confronted Fife and loudly accused her of derailing the closure and contributing to the tragedies that had occurred at the camp. Ak and Fife claimed Williams also threatened to "murder" another advocate at the site — some of whom were there to push back against the city's closure. Williams denied this. Ak has said he then intervened to protect Fife and others, while Williams said Ak attacked and injured him.